Indigenous People have cared for this land for centuries. The land that the Upper Valley Land Trust owns, conserves, and works on, and the land on which we all live, was first stewarded and cared for by indigenous people of the Abenaki Nation, a tribe of the Wabanaki Confederacy. These are the traditional, ancestral, unceded lands of Abenaki people, taken from them by violence. Current day non-indigenous people have benefited from that violence, and that is a history that we are reckoning with.

Indigenous People are not gone, they live here and are a part of the past, present, and future of our land and our communities. We know this acknowledgement is a small step in a bigger process of greater awareness of Native sovereignty and cultural rights. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the Abenaki people, past and present.